She wondered, on the morning of the hundred and sixteenth day, if it was really necessary now. With the yellow gown on she was still not obvious, but now in scrubs alone she looked at least like she was hiding something under her shirt, if not necessarily pregnant. But she had decided, all of a sudden, that it was time, and pretended that she had let Rob, who had in the last two weeks lost sight of any need for secrecy, convince her. She was going to ask for special scrubs to wear at the event tonight, for a special gown that would flair as she danced and rolled, but found herself unexpectedly with a different idea.
When she was little her Aunt Mary had once made her and Calvin a present of marvelous bubble paste, a sort of glue that you could stick on the end of a metal straw and blow up into a huge floating globe. The glue had every color in it, all swirled together in a way that was hard to appreciate before inflation, but quite obvious and lovely in the bubble. When she was five years old it was the prettiest thing she’d ever seen, the bubble colored just like the rainbow in a slick of oil, floating under a blue sky and over green grass, pursued by a crowd of children. I want a bodysuit, she told the angel, and did a bad job of describing the color, sampling and rejecting swath after swath, making herself late for her appointment. She made herself later when she had to try the thing on right away. She put it on and crawled over to the mirror, then stood up, succeeding in surprising herself. The color was startling and just right — she imagined someone sticking a metal straw in her ass and blowing her up into a big, beautiful, worshipful ball. And her belly was startling. She looked more pregnant in this thing than she did when she was naked. It would do. She practiced a couple moves, took off the suit, and put back on her scrubs.
Since the election it took her forever to get anywhere in the hospital. People seemed to feel obliged to stop and talk with her, or rather to stop her and talk to her. “Shouldn’t everyone be able to talk to the Universal Friend?” Rob had asked her, when she complained to him. “How Universal a Friend would you be if only Vivian and I were allowed to talk to you?”
“It’s just a name,” she said, though she understood already that it was not just a name, almost as quickly as she understood that she could not, as her first act of power, undo all the write-ins that had put her on the ballot and won her the position. Strange that so widespread an act — the population was overwhelmingly culpable — could come as such a surprise to the perpetrators. How strange, people said, and how wonderful. Even the also-rans were somehow contented, Dr. Snood having been heard (by an eavesdropping Vivian) to say that it was only because the citizens felt they owed her something that they elected her, not because there was anything the least bit leaderly about her. “She is as great and as strange as the times,” said Dr. Sundae, who was becoming more and more reliably Jemma’s creepy cheerleader. “They know her better than me,” said Ishmael, “because she has touched them.”
“There you are!” said Sylvester’s mother, the first person to accost her that morning. Jemma had almost made it to the stairs when the poodle-haired lady spotted her. She was towing Sylvester in a red wagon. It had been his favorite activity, before Jemma fixed him, and his mother, driven on by his shrill, incomprehensible babbling, had pulled him up and down the ramp and all over the hospital, until she became a figure familiar to everyone, and more than one person remarked that she was somehow representative of their collective toil. Now Sylvester tolerated the rides for his mother’s sake, but he always looked impatient in his wagon, like he had better places to be, or more important things to do. “We’re just going down to the playroom, a quick little trip. How are you? You’re looking well. I like your hair today. Did you style it with a round brush? I always use a round brush. I have a special one that fits right on to the hair dryer, so they’re all of a piece. Is that what you used?”
“Mom, you’re making me late for math,” Sylvester said from the wagon. He was lying on his back reading a book.
“Oh, we’ve got hours,” she said. “I can count too, you know. Hey, if you came upstairs tonight I could show you my hair dryer. If you wet your hair in my sink I could style it for you. Did I tell you I almost had my license, before?”
“I remember,” Jemma said, stepping slowly toward the door to the stairs. Two weeks before she had relieved the lady of her chronic sinusitis, but failed to make her less of a spaz. “Maybe not tonight!” she said cheerily, before she dashed into the stairwell. She hurried down the first flight, paused to listen for activity below her, and then proceeded more slowly. The stairs were usually safe. The elevator never was. She could be entangled in conversation such that she might ride past her floor three times before finally getting out.
On the first floor she cracked the door and peered out before leaving the stairwell. She had not walked five steps before she ran back in again while a troop of children passed by. Led by Marcus Guzman, they were on their way to play soccer on the new field in the lobby. States’-Rights dropped a shin guard by the door. Jemma waited patiently for the child to come retrieve it before she ventured out again. She felt like a bit of a shirker, flattening herself against the wall and extending her unusual senses around corners before putting her head around to confirm that no one was there. Someone might be desperate for conversation, or need advice — though she hadn’t yet dispensed any actual advice, people often left her presence under the impression that they had received some. It had never bothered her before, to do a bad job at something, and she had always thought that people who tried too hard at a thing were a little vulgar, but now the prospect of shirking made her feel sad and somehow dirty. The feeling that she was a fraud, that she was elected by mistake, was slow to fade, but the feeling that accompanied the suspicion of fraud — a certainty that, because her election had been part of some grand prank it was okay to shirk — faded quickly.
She had to hide in an exam room five doors from the place she was supposed to meet Vivian because a pair of nurses came down the hall, one from either end, and trapped her. They met right outside the door where she was hiding, and she was sure they would come in, forcing her inside a cabinet, or under the exam table. But they lounged outside, chatting briefly, and then they were quiet, but not gone. Jemma peeked through the window to see them smooching. The empty halls and rooms of the ER had developed a reputation as the hospital’s Lovers Lane. It was an issue that the Council was supposed to discuss, what to do with the empty space, and whether it should approve, condemn, or even comment on what transpired there. Most people got a room, and cleaned up after themselves, but these two pinned each other against Jemma’s door, and knocked their hips and shoulders against the glass. She might have put them both to sleep, or afflicted each with a debilitating orgasm, one that would take hours to recover from, so they’d not notice a pack of elephants let alone Jemma passing down the hall as they lay twitching on the carpet, but she waited patiently for them to exhaust their bag of foreplay tricks and move out of the hall to get down to the more serious business. They tried to come into her room but she held the knob against them.
“You’re so fucking late,” Vivian said, when she finally arrived at the exam room they’d been using for her checkups. She was leaning against an ultrasound machine, slapping the transducer against her palm.